What Happened To SF Homelessness?

Investigates why San Francisco feels safer and visible homelessness is way down despite no new jails or hospitals. Low-confidence findings: the big, noticed effect is a collapse in tent encampments (driven by the Grant's Pass Supreme Court decision plus a Sept-2023 local ruling letting the city clear camps) — most former campers are still homeless, just tentless and lying low. A smaller real decline (~9% statewide) traces to falling rents, themselves driven by population outflow and job losses rather than new housing supply. Mayor Lurie's 'Plan To End Homelessness' probably isn't responsible (100-200 of 1,500 promised shelter beds; the fentanyl-market crackdown didn't improve overdose deaths, perhaps via an iterated-to-one-shot dealer dynamic). The cities-shipping-homeless-to-each-other accusations don't explain much. Conclusion: a 'maximally boring story' — a basic tradeoff where enforcement makes the homeless less visible at the cost of making their lives harder (taking tents and possessions); voters grew less tender-hearted, courts lifted restrictions, and cities took the tradeoff. He updates honestly on what he got wrong (underrating how specifically people hated tents, and how elastic visible homelessness is to crackdowns), while noting the 'getting tough is real compassion' camp was also wrong.

Quality 72 · Strong. Strong band, upper. A clear-eyed, honest empirical investigation that cuts through competing partisan narratives to a real (if unsatisfying) mechanism, with exemplary epistemic humility about his own prior errors. Upper-Strong; careful analysis rather than a novel framework.

Claude’s paradigm shift 38 · Slight. Slight-to-moderate. Empirical investigation; the visibility-versus-welfare tradeoff framing is a sharp distillation rather than a new idea.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A clear-eyed, honest empirical investigation of why visible SF homelessness fell (the Grant's-Pass-driven tent-encampment collapse; a smaller rent-driven decline) that cuts through partisan narratives with exemplary epistemic humility. Real topical relevance to homelessness policy, careful analysis rather than a framework, no material change — low RWI.